Overview
Every year, the School Financial Services (SFS) team members provide a variety of educational documents to assist school staff, auditors and members of the general public to better understand how schools are financially supported in Wisconsin.
Click a link below for more information.
Auditor Presentations
PowerPoint presentations from the Wisconsin Institute of Certified Public Accountants (WICPA) auditor conferences and other Department of Public Instruction (DPI) sessions.
SFS Team Presentations
PowerPoint presentations and related documents developed to serve the end-users of the SFS website. In March of each year, the SFS Team presents its own "Spring Financial Workshop". The SFS team members are frequent presenters to the following organizations:
- WASB - Wisconsin Association of School Boards;
- WASDA - Wisconsin Association of School District Administrators; and
- WASBO - Wisconsin Association of School Business Officials
On occasion, team members will give a presentation to other educational organizations as the schedule allows.
Tutorials (under re-development)
Written and produced by the Finance Team, this page provides links to different tutorials that provide basic information and instruction about various topics. Most tutorials are less than six minutes in length and special software is not needed to play them.
Wisconsin School Finance System
Wisconsin has 322 K-12 Common school districts, one First Class school district, 45 Unified school districts, 43 elementary (K-8) districts, and 10 union high school (9-12) districts, for a total of 421 public school districts. One of the state's 43 K-8 districts is a unified school district. All are fiscally independent; that is, they do not depend on other local units of government (such as counties or municipalities) for their local tax revenue. Each district has taxing authority.
In addition, 12 cooperative educational service agencies (CESAs)--which are fiscally dependent on school districts--provide programs and services to local districts. Five counties operate county children with disabilities education boards (CCDEBs) of which one is fiscally dependent and four are fiscally independent.